ACCESS 14, Spring 1999

Back in the 1950s and 1960S, a basic aim for the newly proposed BART system was to curb urban sprawl. The trick was to reinforce major metropolitan centers and
create new suburban subcenters. Because land adjacent to BART’s station sites would be highly accessible, its planners expected they’d be powerful magnets attracting offices, shops, and high-density housing. Those concentrations would make for culturally enriched residential life and a more viable local economy. In turn, they’d attract riders to BART and thus help reduce traffic congestion.

BART was the first American rail rapid transit system to be built in modern times, and its arrival was greeted with worldwide attention. BART is famous. Its fame is attached to its favorable image as the answer to the problems of the modern American metropolis. And the extent to which it has succeeded, or failed, to live up to expectations is an important lesson for other cities wanting to emulate it.

A long tradition in urban planning seeks land use arrangements that reduce the need for travel, especially drive-alone travel. Current variations on this idea in the United States include jobs-housing balancing (locating jobs and housing nearby one another), transit villages (dense, mixed-use urban development with medium to high-rise housing concentrated near transit stops), and New Urbanism (a less dense, neighborhood form focusing on pedestrianism, transit, and mixed land uses).

Most railroad companies around the world own and maintain all the necessary facilities and equipment to provide rail transportation service. Different railroads often serve different regions, so a long distance movement might involve the cooperation of two or more railroads. A freight container moving from the port of Los Angeles to Atlanta might be transferred from the Union Pacific Railroad to the CSX Railroad, for example, while a passenger coach from Paris to Frankfurt would be transferred from the French to the German national railways at the border. But within its respective service area, each railroad usually owns all or most of the needed locomotives, wagons, tracks, yards, and stations. In the parlance of economists, railroads are often horizontally separated in that different railroads serve different regions, but they are almost always vertically integrated in the sense that they provide all the functions needed to offer rail service within their region.

Roads, bridges, gasoline, internal combustion engines, and automatic transmissions were singular advances on the way to modern automobiles. But, without goggles, the horseless carriage might have been slow to arrive. Dust in the eye was objectionable, debilitating, and dangerous at the new high speeds. Whatever access the automobile promised, a driver couldn’t enjoy it if blinded, even momentarily. Developments leading to modern transport systems have been a long series of accommodations to what our eyes can and can’t do. Because future developments must compensate for the limitations of human sight and take advantage of its capabilities, my laboratory has been examining various relations between vision and transportation. Here I’d like to tell about some of those relations.

Prior to 1923 California, like most states, financed highway construction and maintenance by issuing general obligation bonds. By the early ’20s direct appropriations for highways and interest payments on the bonds had risen to more than 40 percent of the state’s budget. So in 1923 California adopted a new system of highway finance using earmarked user fees, in particular the per-gallon fuel tax. Before long all fifty states had similar user taxes, as did the federal government.